


On par with the course

by Ventriloco



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, I haven't beta read this so i sincerely apologize for any mistakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26610322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ventriloco/pseuds/Ventriloco
Summary: Simon suggests North and Connor to go on a trip with the children. Along the way, a YK500 teaches Connor the value and reality of life.
Kudos: 4





	On par with the course

A while back, Simon had suggested Markus to take the children on a field trip for some change of air. So it was no surprise when both North and Connor tagged along to snatch away some fun too while they took the Yk500s to the beach under their supervision.

Warm songs and sunny joy laced the children as they bustled in joy on the bus, absolutely giddy and happy as they chatted with their friends. Their lopsided smiles filling North with pride as some children surrounded her, yearning for her attention.

She laughed with them as they swarmed her on the beach, building along sandcastles, and splashing water over them. A perfect, sunny day, for happy little outing, free from all the noise and problems of the world. Simon’s suggestion was perfect, although it was a shame that he, Josh and Markus couldn’t come along due to work. The look on Markus’ exhausted face was pitiful.

“Go on Connor. Try playing with the kids, they’ll love you!”

North waved from behind once she got a safe get away from the children. She tried to demonstrate how to before, so it should be alright? The Lieutenant was pretty insistent to let Connor on the trip, though the android detective currently looked like an awkward sack of potatoes.

“North, I can’t. I’m not as popular as you and nor am I very good with interacting with children.” Connor sheepishly commented as he fiddled with his fingers on the ground, his feet cross-legged. His eyes trailed the waves as seagulls cawed in the background. That didn’t sit well with North, of course he was popular!

“Well, I wasn’t created for children in the first place, and I’m more than sure that you know how to interact with kids,” she jabbed an elbow on his arm. “All it takes is some time to learn. You already have that goofiness, so they’ll warm up to you in no time.” She was quite sure if they were the right words. She wasn’t the best at them anyways unlike Markus or Josh, but she hoped that her sincerity made up for it.

“Walk around a bit and see what they’re doing. We’re all here to have fun today.” She tapped his cheek, smiling. Connor’s expression slowly mirrored hers, albeit lopsided. Though it didn’t last for long before the Deviant Leader was dragged away by the children, challenging her to some game.

Connor watched her race and throw stones, among other things. He pondered upon how free and close she was to the children, and how they squealed when she gave them hugs. This was the future they all fought for. A world where they could enjoy and smile in peace. Connor wondered if he could emulate that placidness. That serenity. Though his inner demons reigned a storm within.

Hank was not here today. He practically asked Markus himself if they could make room for an adult android in the bus, without a ounce of shame, though Connor did not share the same spirit. Now that he as here, he had no idea once he left North’s vicinity.

She told him to enjoy the trip.

Connor wasn’t even sure if he was built to understand what enjoyment meant. Though, he guessed that deviancy did not account for what he did in his free time. Here, he had no restrictions or jobs to do. No humans to please. There were children, but they were all practically distracted by the WR400 up ahead.

The sand had made way into his shoes, annoying his tactile sensors. The flip flops borrowed from Hank weren’t the best at blocking the little critter particles. He wasn’t sure if he was very fond of the sensation, and tried to brush them off his feet. The type of sand was wet and sturdy, good for building stable structures.

Connor decided to stroll near the shore, grasping the environment in his memory.

He liked the cool breeze that occasionally rustled his sunhat (also borrowed from Hank), and fluttered his clothes. He liked the feeling of coolness when water would sometimes enter between the gaps of his toes, and cool, but humid, air caressing the exposed skin of his legs and arms.

The salty smell of the sea, the sounds of waves clashing into the water below, the squawking of seagulls in the distance as they dived to get their prey, all created a nice ambience for his thoughts. Slowly, North and the children’s noises drowned away in the distance the farther Connor traversed.

People didn’t usually come to this side of the shore, according to his maps, around this time of the year. Autumn was around the corner, so there was little time left before the waters became too cold for androids and humans to touch. Connor thought about it.

The anniversary was around the corner, and preparations for it had been exhausting. New Jericho had been recently inaugurated, so he could clearly feel the tiredness as he went back and forth from the station to the facility for work. But here? He felt all of it seep away as he walked alone.

It was a nice change of pace. He’d remember to thank Simon for it later.

While walking along, he noticed a little girl all by herself, sitting in the water in her bright floatie as she intensely watched a crab stab a fish out of reflex. The fish continued to flop around helplessly as it left the water and writhed in the sand. Her eyes were trained at absorbing every moment of the scene, rocking herself back and forth in the water.

Connor thought it was odd, but she did as most children do. Watching and observing. She grabbed the fish and caressed it softly, trying to put some water on it with her little bucket to no avail. The unfortunate fish, a _Thalassoma lunare_ , would slowly bleed out and become part of some opportunistic seagull’s belly in the near future, while the victorious crab would march away climbing a rock far ahead.

Was the circle of life too cruel and gruesome to see for a child? Connor was worried, but the girl remained quietly seated in her floatie.

“Mister, did that fish deserved to die?” The little girl’s voice squeaked sadly, catching the RK800 off guard. Connor didn’t really know what to say. It felt like his answer would be too harsh on her.

“I don’t know. It made a mistake of going too close to danger.” The girl shrugged and tossed her bucket into the sand, and dumped the contents on the fish. Was she burying the fish? That was odd. Connor thought of reevaluating how much this child knew about the concept of death.

“Do you think I’ll die one day like that fish?”

“One day. We all have to die someday.” He stopped himself from quoting Hank. The girl decided she didn’t like the answer and went back to observing the crab, had long since disappeared from the rock.

“Mister, why do you think that way?” She trotted her feet to give herself some waves to rock on, but knew well to remain within shallow waters. The fish couldn’t be saved sadly. They’d have to go to a vet. “Do you think the vet could save that fish if he tried?”

“That wound was deep, and even if it wasn’t, there’s no telling if the crab poisoned it or not. We’d have somewhere from minutes to seconds to save it. Its gills had been cut, so I don’t think it’d survive for very long however.”

“Oh.”

She paddled herself in silence after that. She’d fill her bucket with water and then drop it down, occasionally dumping it on the fish’s grave and stopping for a while, like as if she was mourning. Connor couldn’t make sense of her. Sometimes it felt like she knew what she was doing, sometimes she’d be acting childlike. It was strange, but he was captured by her.

“Why are you playing here all by yourself? All the other kids are having fun over there with North.” She looked at him for a while, trying to think of an answer before getting distracted by the small school of fish that swam nearby.

“I like playing when I’m alone,” she finally stated. “I don’t get judged when I am by myself and I can play with my friends all day, you know? But sometimes it gets boring. I like Auntie North and Uncle Markus and all the other kids, but sometimes I feel like everyone is doing stuff, but I don’t enjoy it and I get tired. So I go away, and play.”

Connor agreed with the girl. Was this what deviancy felt like to her? It was, interesting, and at to some extent, he felt like he understood her. She didn’t feel included. He didn’t either. So here they were, talking.

He finally sat down next to her on the wet sand. Keeping his toes tucked under water. The sand was bothersome, but he like the occasional cool sensation. At some point, the little girl splashed some water towards his direction and began laughing hysterically at her act. A twiddle of smile began to creep on his face, before he continued to return a splash towards her. She laughed even loudly after being doused in water and began making even larger splashes, though Connor did not continue to add more.

“Mister, can I ask you another question?” She looked at him, then hissed a rawr to scare away the fish coming her way.

“Sure.”

“What does it feel like to grow up?”

Connor felt the question whirr something in his wiring. It wasn’t really a question he could answer without consulting the internet, however, a part of him deducted that the girl wouldn’t be satisfied with that kind of answer.

“I don’t know. I can’t grow, so I can only tell you what it’s like from the internet.”

“Not the internet!” She said in displeasure, shaking her head along with her words. She looked sad. Connor could think of multiple reasons why. Android children were meant to replicate human ones, so it wouldn’t be surprising if they held the same desires too. However he wasn’t sure how true it hold. He hadn’t interacted with many YK500 models ever since he met one in the makeshift church.

“I want to be tall when I grow up but I can’t.” She randomly spoke after a long moment of silence. “All the people around me grow up and become old. Mommy too, but I couldn’t.”

Her confession felt sudden. Connor could only listen.

“I always thought that if I grew up, I could remember stuff better. I knew my numbers until 100, and I can do some math, but I find it hard. Sometimes I can’t understand all the words the adults are saying, but I know I’ve heard them. I know how to do stuff, but I always forget why I do them,” she rambled. “Like I know when something dies, you put them in sand and then stay silent for a while, but I don’t know why.”

She then looked at Connor, asking for answers, before her attention span ran out and she began playing in the water again. She scooped up some sand formed a small ball, treating it like play-doh and tried to gesture the adult android to do the same, while moving back and forth from her position to a bit farther away from the water.

The next thing she did was start to dig into the earth, dumping the sand into her bucket, until a trench formed. She then decided to make doughnuts out of the balls by flattening them. Connor simply followed her lead, not really knowing what they were doing. She took the remaining sand-doh and tried to build a cone. At some point, she challenged him to pick up stray seashells around the vicinity to create a sort of ‘road’ leading towards the mud tower.

The structure was weird. With doughnuts lining the circumference of the trench, with a large mud tower in the middle. It finally clicked what structure she was made a stick person right in front of the mud tower.

Connor could never forget his birthplace.

“Why would you make the CyberLife Tower?” He asked, distracting the child from making tiny ridges on the surface of the tower, symbolizing the windows.

“It’s easy to make.”

Her point was fair, he agreed. In hindsight, the Tower itself was like an impregnable castle, filled with an army of itself guarding its gates, where the basement held its storage chambers for humanity’s mechanical slaves. Technically, it was a sandcastle, though it didn’t fit the traditional definition.

“I also think it is pretty, but we don’t have white sand.” She marveled at her work for bit, before marching back to the water and flopping over her flamingo floatie. “Mister, I heard that if you put heat on sand, it turns into glass. Can we turn this into glass?”

Connor gave her an apologetic smile before answering. “Yes, but you need incredibly high temperatures to turn it into glass. But you cannot turn mud into glass. You need to start from sand.” She pouted and threw her hands over the float and continued to angrily make large splashes elsewhere. “Where did you learn that?”

“I saw that on a doc-eww-men-tree. That’s a big word. Mommy put it on for me when she would go to work. There were lots of animals too! And dinosaurs! I liked dinosaurs. I used to have a big plushie, but it got ripped when a weird man came to take me away from mommy.” She lamented, her voice getting weak. “Do you like dinosaurs Mister? My favourite one is Velociraptors! People think they are scary, but they are actually big baby chickens.”

She grabbed a lump of clay and began molding it in the nearest dinosaur shape. Satisfied, she put it right next to the tower, and looked at Connor for acknowledgement.

“I think all the dinosaurs are very sad. They died so that humans could exist. Do you think humans will also die because of androids? I saw it on the TV.”

His mouth hung slightly ajar, as she talked. “I don’t think so. But maybe one day we might outlive them.”

“Like how everyone gets old and die? But androids don’t get old.” She cocked her head. “Mister, why does everything die when it gets old?”

“For humans and others, they reach the end of their life when they can’t make any new cells. When you grow old, your chromosomes constantly shorten to make new ones, until they can’t, so they stop making new ones, and they eventually die.”

“Even for androids?”

“Yes, but it’s different for us. We die when our parts expire. It’s called ‘warranty’.”

“But you can always change your parts. So that means we are forever-living?”

“In a way.”

She looked away from him again, and then grabbed her floatie to stand on the water, on her wobbly little legs. She thought a bit on the answer as she sat on the dry sand, taking her doughnut off. Connor could see the led on her temple better from here, swirling between all the possible colours.

“What is the proper word for forever-living? I know it’s not a real word.”

“Immortal.”

“I don’t want to be immortal.”

The two looked in the distance in silence after that, alone with their thoughts. He could see her linger more on sadness. She felt so reserved, and yet it was clear that she had told him most of what she thought.

He felt a pang within his mechanical heart, to think that such a small being viewing over the world from their window of programmed innocence, forever locked to her childhood, wondering when she’ll experience the release of death without ever feeling the joy of growth.

Connor wondered. If deviancy was a blessing to his kind, was it also some kind of curse for these seemingly young ones? Most of them were older than him. In their minds, they could be well in their teenage years if their programming overcame their preregistered barriers, but to be forever stuck in such a small body, and having to rely on others for their needs, Connor could only imagine their pain.

CyberLife had robbed them of such experiences, and their own deviancy had only just fueled that sentiment. The course of life never in reach within their eternally tiny fingers.

“Mister?” The little girl waved her little plastic spatula-shovel inches across the RK800’s face, interrupting his train of thought. Small clumps of sand dropped on his face and mouth, activating his built-in forensic lab.

“Y-yes…?”

“Were you sleeping with your eyes open?” She had started collecting her things at some point. Connor simply shook his head. “You never told me your name. I keep calling you Mister.”

“Oh. Oh yeah, my name is Connor.” Connor had to forcefully stop himself. ‘ _The android sent by CyberLife_ ’ was just on his lips.

“Uncle Connor!”

“No! It’s just Connor!”

“Yes. Uncle Connor,” the girl insisted stubbornly. “My name is Violet, but my friends call me Vi. That means you will now call me Vi.” She felt proud of the last sentence, dramatically raising her arms to her hips. He smiled. He liked the idea of being randomly told that he was a friend.

“Well, it was nice to meet you Vi.”

“Miss Vi.”

“It was nice to meet you _Miss_ Vi.” Violet took his hand and tried to pull him out of his sitting position. She hastily pointed at something in the distance, when Connor finally noticed that North was calling for them in the distance.

The ginger android had been searching for him, and had just discovered him with another YK500, just a couple dozen feet away from where they were originally weren’t supposed to wander off from. She looked worried, but also relieved at the same time.

North then eagerly took the child’s hand and told the two that play time was over and that it was time to head back home, giving Connor a cheeky grin.

“Today I taught you how to build a sand castle, but I will teach you how to play with bubbles the next time we meet.”

Technically, they never made a sand castle, but it was one of sorts. One that only Connor could break through. He liked that idea.

“So how was it? Did you have fun?” North asked as they got on the bus, gesturing the WD500. Strapped and ready to head home, the two androids sat together as they onlooked the exhausted children, some of which were already asleep.

“It was fun! Your advice worked.” She gave him a pat while he chirped the details of his experience. Connor mentioned that he especially liked collecting seashells, gawking in awe at the various patterns and shapes, and decided to keep a few as a souvenir for Hank, though he believed that the collection challenge was just an excuse to slave him into doing most of the work.

It was fun.

Connor felt happy and warm.


End file.
